Water & Wastewater Asia May/June 2019

52 | OPINION
Flood resiliency: How can cities be prepared for an
increasingly unpredictable future?
With climate change, flooding has become a serious issue around the world. But with more and
more people moving to the cities and the metropolises themselves rapidly urbanising, preparations
for flood resiliency must take priority.
By Adam Kua, Huilin Yi, Dr Victor Sim
Looking back, 2018 was a year of due to climate change.
unprecedented global weather events.
In Asia, Super Typhoon Mangkhut How do all these impact our lives and the
brought close to $50 billion in damages to places we call home? How will our cities deal
Hong Kong and China on top of the $16 to with such uncertainties of the future? Are we
$20 billion it extracted from
the Philippines. Extreme
precipitation-induced
flooding in Kerala killed
at least 350 people and
displaced over 800,000,
and 2019 started off with a
historic deep freeze in the
United States, brought about
by unusual polar vortex
formation.
Climate change has long
been associated with such
extreme events and is the
Super Typhoon Mangkhut making landfall in Hong Kong.
biggest threat to the planet,
Image credited to Anthony Kwan/Bloomberg
as reported by the World
Economic Forum. Unless
drastic changes are made to prevent doing enough to overcome the challenges
global temperatures from rising, it is likely that lie ahead while mitigating risks? The
such events with continue occurring with field of “Resiliency” attempts to shed
increased magnitude and frequency. These light on planning ahead for such possible
events will continue to interact with complex uncertainties of the future.
systems and eventually set off ripple effects
of their own.
From a broader perspective, resiliency
is defined by the capacity of individuals,
Over the last two decades, climate-related communities, institutions, businesses, and
disasters accounted for 91 per cent of all systems within a city to survive, adapt,
events, with floods topping the list at 43 per and grow no matter what kinds of chronic
cent, and recent research has also shown stresses and acute shocks they experience.
that the frequency, intensity, and duration From a flooding perspective, it is about how
of such disasters will continue to increase cities can plan for a flood-resilient future.
The recent World Economic Forum 2019
saw Industrialisation 4.0 taking centre
stage with a focus on digitisation and
use of multiple layers of data to generate
insights and predictions unlike before.
Such an approach towards
flood resiliency will transcend
current approaches that are
conducted in a siloed and
non-integrated fashion.
While embarking on
digitisation endeavours and
re-evaluating traditional
approaches, we should
not neglect processes that
have worked brilliantly for
billions of years – nature.
By safeguarding natural
buffers, we can leverage them
to enhance protective
functions and confer disaster
resilience, keeping in line
with United Nations Disaster Risk Reduction
Framework.
Urban planning usually deals with storm
waters by discharging them into sewers
as soon as they make landfall, but recent
unprecedented flooding events across the
globe with effects exacerbated by both
climate change and urbanisation have proven
that such an approach is no longer relevant.
Instead, a softer approach should be taken
as opposed to solely upsizing and re-laying
concrete pipes and sewers for every new
flooding hotspot.
Water & Wastewater Asia • May / June 2019